Personally I don't mind if people I follow post about politics that don't affect me personally, it's good for me to know more about different places and I want to know what affects my friends'/acquaintances' lives. I suppose this is another culture shift between people who came from other social media and people who apparently want their feed to be a neat long series of content warnings.
Ironically, quote boosts would make adding CWs to boosts much more viable and accessible. But anyway.
To clarify, I always checked new follows anyway to boot obvious bigots, spammers, and trolls. However, sometimes they would slip through the cracks. On this pass, most removals/blocks were genocide deniers/"blue no matter who" types (lotta overlap there) who had followed me before 7 Oct and hadn't been displaying those views at that volume at that point. I also removed some "claim to mean well, do not have the range to engage, absolutely will engage to aggro people they say they support" types.
You don't have to be completely knowledgeable about everything to follow me (I'm certainly not), but I have to at least try to trust you won't make things worse for the people you say you want to learn from when you talk to them.
Anyway, tracking follows here sucks but if you see someone who follows me (or who I follow) being obnoxious to someone in the name of "I will be an asshole until/while you teach me about racism/transphobia/misogyny/colonialism/etc ad nauseam," feel free to let me know.
Whenever I hit a follower "milestone" I try to go through and review nonmutuals who follow me to help keep my feed safer for those I follow. Doing this today only affirmed that locking down follows (which I originally only did because I saw timeline-creeping by someone I didn't trust) was a good idea, now I can do this as requests come in and not randomly.
To clarify, I always checked new follows anyway to boot obvious bigots, spammers, and trolls. However, sometimes they would slip through the cracks. On this pass, most removals/blocks were genocide deniers/"blue no matter who" types (lotta overlap there) who had followed me before 7 Oct and hadn't been displaying those views at that volume at that point. I also removed some "claim to mean well, do not have the range to engage, absolutely will engage to aggro people they say they support" types.
Whenever I hit a follower "milestone" I try to go through and review nonmutuals who follow me to help keep my feed safer for those I follow. Doing this today only affirmed that locking down follows (which I originally only did because I saw timeline-creeping by someone I didn't trust) was a good idea, now I can do this as requests come in and not randomly.
Let's stop pretending that every action we take that is aligned with our beliefs is also easy.
Sure, in some cases it is easy, and also definitely don't be a weird martyr about it, but sour-grapesing everything you boycott isn't helpful or a signifier of whatever ideological purity you're chasing.
It also enables the type of people who twist "no ethical consumption under capitalism" to mean "if trying to do better makes me slightly uncomfortable or inconvenienced, I will simply not try."
Shar(yna)Tran/Shark(aeopteryx)